RE: [Leica] kyle's lost his @#$@#$! mind - week 35

["Dan Honemann" <ddh@home.com>]

Wow, Johnny.  I've been impressed and learned a great deal from many posts
to the LUG, but this one really blows me away.  Regardless of where any of
us stand in regard to Kyle's latest project, you've managed an incredibly
powerful, well-articulated thesis on the dangers of relinquishing
fundamental rights to "authorities."  Well done.

It's clear your talent to express the truth as you see it is not confined to
photography.  This one will stay with me for a long time, as do so many
images from human traffic.

Dan

> -----Original Message-----
> Actually, not one of my films was done 'with the permission of'
> psychiatrists, psychologists et al. Two of them were vehemently
> critical of
> abuses within the system and both led to reforms, one to a public inquiry,
> one to new powers for an oversight body.
>
> Fundamentally, inless the person concerned has been committed (or
> 'sectioned' as the law has it in the UK) they are perfectly free to make
> their own decisions and even if they are 'sectioned' or 'committed' I
> believe ethically the onus of proof remains on the powers that
> confine them
> to show that they are unable to make rational decisions.
>
> The notion that as soon as someone has some identifiable mental problem in
> whatever degree they can no longer make decisions for themselves
> and instead
> a committee of 'professionals' must be deferred to is, IMHO, an extremely
> dangerous and troubling one. I have seen the results first hand
> (see below).
> Human beings are human beings. One of the things I DID learn in my travels
> was 'they' aren't 'they', they're 'us'.
>
> Anyone who wants further proof of any of this should go to their public
> library and order up the reports of the 1992 committee of inquiry into
> Ashworth Hospital, chaired by Sir Louis Blom Cooper, and read the whole
> thing if they can stomach it. When you get to the bit about the way Sean
> Walton died locked in an isolation cell after being hit over the
> head with a
> snooker cue by staff at the hospital in front of several witnesses, remind
> yourself that until a bunch of filmmakers, who were opposed at
> every turn by
> the Hospital professionals (with one or two very noble
> exceptions), started
> talking to patients and ex-patients WITHOUT permission, no-one on the
> outside of the hospital had the faintest idea of the circumstances
> surrounding the poor lad's death.
>
> That really WAS my last word on the subject in this forum apart from this
> one: Good luck to Kyle.
>
> Over & out.
> --
> Johnny Deadman
>
> http://www.pinkheadedbug.com